Bob and Leroy had just sat down in a slightly uncomfortable, fake-leather-seated booth at the café. Two nuns sat at a small table across from them, also looking uncomfortable.

One of the nuns was taller than the other and a good deal older. The shorter one was drinking a cup of coffee to the other’s tea.

The tall one said abruptly, “Sister Mary, you really should stop drinking coffee. And, sit up straight. I don’t know how many times I’ve told you.” And she made an old nun’s tsk-tsk before sipping her tea.

The shorter one, Sister Mary, looked hard at the older nun across the table. Her eyes were deadly. Bob and Leroy watched them with blatant interest.

In a fit, suddenly, Sister Mary tore off her head covering and balled it up in a white-knuckled fist.

“Sister Mary,” said, the shorter Mary, “I have lost track of how many times you have told me that over these last ten months, but it’s the third time today.” As she spoke her voice rose in pitch and intensity.

Now she was yelling. “I don’t know, Sister Mary,” she sneered the name, especially the Sister part, “what is more amazing: the fact that I’m not just like you after all your fucking advice or that you still don’t understand that that is what you are trying to do – turn me into a straight-backed stodgy old bitch like you!”

She threw her head piece at the tall Sister Mary’s head, almost knocking off her head piece. The short Sister Mary stood up and stormed out of the café while the other Sister Mary watched her leave then, abashedly, took a sip from her tea before going to the counter to pay.

I heard the quiet then. At first I thought I had gotten up too early. It was too quiet. Then I went to the bath room and turned on the shower. I shaved as I waited for the water to heat up.

Then it came to me.

I was dead.

I was living in the afterlife.

I thought – this is what it’s like to be dead. Quiet. So quiet, but you keep doing what you’re doing. You shave and you take a shower and you go outside and get into your car and drive to work.

No one is there. The streets are empty. There is no one at the office. No one in the café. You’re alone in the afterlife. Utterly alone in the quiet of a world that looks and feels exactly the same as it did in life.

4. Two very different fabrics of memory: The poetry (and closure) of good memories. The anguish (and continuity) of bad memories. The good seems gone, though sweet. There is almost a scent, a sort of fleeting quality to the good memories – a sense that what was best can never be recovered. With the bad memories, there is a sense that something about them is impossible to escape. Bad memories tell a story about our character – they define us, so ineluctably, and brand us with the hot iron of a pain that still feels fresh within the space of memory.

Gary wasn’t a big reader, but he’d read enough books to have come across stories of olden-day American preachers who baptized people in the river. It was always a river. Never a creek. Maybe creeks were too shallow. Didn’t have the same effect.

That was a hundred years ago. But there he was. A preacher in the river.

Gary was on his bike going home, passing through a park near the downtown area. The park was right on the edge of the river, which was empty nine months of the year. During summer, boats would zip along with people in tow, balanced drunkenly on skis.

It was too cold for that now, though it was not yet winter. Gary wore a t-shirt and long pants with one leg rolled up. He’d lost enough pants to the bite of his bike’s gears to learn to roll up one leg.

Not thinking about anything in particular, he was making his way through the park. Then he saw a man in a brightly white, but frayed-looking, robe-kind-of get-up, standing on the edge of the river, waist deep in the slow moving water.

Gary always thought the river was deeper right there. He slowed down on his bike.

“Come over here, son,” the man shouted.

Gary was fifty feet away. He got off his bike but didn’t approach the man. It’s too late for this, he thought. A hundred years too late.

“Come over here. I won’t bite.”

Gary pulled his bike up the little hill above the bike path and laid down his bike. Sitting down next to it, he faced the man in the worn-out, super-bright white robe.

The man looked at him but didn’t call out again. Gary waved one hand just above his head in a gesture intended to say, “I see you over there and I’m staying where I am.” The man seemed to understand.

Gary wanted to see what would happen.

Patrols came though this park every hour, cruising slow in big-engined squad cars that purred like hippos. Gary thought he’d wait and see if one came.

Two women who looked to be in their thirties appeared around the bend of the footpath a couple hundred feet away. You can tell age from far away like that most of the time. They were walking a dog, a white one. The preacher guy spotted them and looked back up at Gary then turned back to wait for the two women.

They walked slowly.

Is this how they did it a hundred years ago? Gary kept looking at the ragged white figure, waist-deep in the river. Back then the rivers weren’t so filthy. At least they had that going for them. Maybe people trusted the eccentricities of strangers back then. Now they only trust them if they’re on TV.

Did they stand and wait for random passers-by back then or put up flyers around town? They must have done something besides just stand in a river. This was no way to build a crowd.

The women’s dog noticed the preacher and started pulling at its leash as if the sight of the man in the water proved something to the dog.

It had been lied to all these years. You are allowed to go in the river.

Without barking, the dog strained at its leash. The women stopped walking and looked amused. They were still fifty feet away from the man in the river.

“Come on over here, ladies,” the man said. “I won’t bite.”

His repertoire was not especially rich.

The women looked at each other and patiently allowed the dog to wear itself out against the leash. The preacher turned to Gary. Gary waved again with the same wave, just above his head, his right hand moving once to the left and once to the right.

Pulling the dog away from the water, the woman holding the leash backed up the slope above the path. Her friend did the same and the women walked toward Gary, keeping their distance from the man in white. The looks on their faces said they were going to ask Gary what was going on.

“What’s going on? Who is that guy?” the woman with the leash asked him.

The dog had no interest in Gary. It sat down on the ground.

“I have no idea. I’m just waiting to see what happens when the cops show up.”

“Why? Did somebody call the police?”

“Not that I know of,” Gary said, “but, you know, they come through here a lot.”

The second woman chimed in, “I wonder if that’s legal, standing in the river.”

“Seems like you’d need a business license or something,” the first woman said.

In short shorts and tight shirts, the women looked very much alike, but the woman with the dog had stronger looking arms and darker hair than her friend.

“You’re welcome to join me and enjoy the show,” Gary said. He said it without any real energy. Sometimes being neutral puts people at ease.

The women looked at each other with a similar neutrality then looked back down at the preacher who was looking up at the three of them.

A jogger caught the preacher’s eye. A man was coming from the same direction the women had come from, moving swiftly but looking like he was tired of running.

He was going to pass right in front of the preacher.

The preacher raised his arms so that his sleeves fell back. Gary could see dark splotches of color on the inside of each of his biceps that were probably tattoos.

“This is the hour!” the preacher shouted.

The jogger slowed down when he heard that and stopped in front of the preacher. Looking at his watch, the jogger shouted the time at the preacher.

“No, this is the hour! The hour.”

The jogger shook his head. He was tired. He bent at the waist and put his hands on his knees, breathing hard.

Gary couldn’t hear what the preacher said then and he couldn’t tell if the jogger was saying anything. He could just see the preacher’s mouth moving and see that the jogger was looking at the preacher and kept shaking his head.

The preacher must have looked in Gary’s direction because the jogger suddenly turned around and looked up at Gary and the two women. Right then the women began to move.

They walked down to the path and pulled the dog along with them. Before they were out of ear-shot the dark-haired one with the strong arms turned back and smiled at Gary and said, “Let us know what happens.”

Looking at himself in the mirror made him feel shallow and sad, he analyzed the imperfections of his face with despair. He tried to tell himself that he had little control of how he looked and that it was beyond vain to be placing worth on such matters. He couldn’t help it. He was fascinated by his repulsiveness.

George uttered the words at himself with a sterile disdain, “I hate you.”

His reflection in the mirror looked back at him with tired eyes seemingly saying, “I know you do.”

George closed his eyes and put his head down to look in the sink. Starting the water he looked up again and screamed violently. Running his hands through the cold water he started to calm, he splashed some on his face and turned off the sink.

George’s pants loosely hung around his waist as he walked around his apartment. He found a t-shirt and put it on before finding his keys. As he walked out the door he looked at the cluttered mess around his mattress and felt something inside of him sulk.

George staggered down the stairs and into the car his parents had given him for his birthday. Pulling into traffic he nearly sideswiped the car in front of him narrowly avoiding rear ending a pristine sedan at the stoplight in front of him, “Fuck!”

The light changed as George looked down at his pants which were stained with ash and smeared drops of beer. Snapping out of his daze he heard the car behind him honking. George rolled down his window, “Aww Fuck you! What’d I ruin your day?”

George put his car in first gear and stalled the engine. He sighed and started it up and raced through the intersection as the light turned red. He watched with great satisfaction as the car behind him was stuck at the light in his rear view mirror. “Fuckers…” he muttered as he pulled a rolled cigarette from the middle pocket of his hoodie. Lighting it up he played a CD from his favorite band The Bad Sandwich Chronicles. Singing along to every song he drove haphazardly to his place of employment. If anyone was born genetically predisposed to hate working in a retail environment, it was George. Yet, that was his lot at this stage of his existence.

George pulled into a parking space at Allmart and in doing so careened with a shopping cart. The cart went rolling towards an island of parked cars and struck an SUV with force. With the SUV’s alarm blaring through the parking lot George hastily got out of his car and walked swiftly into the store.

An elderly greeter smiled at George, “Good morning!”

George mumbled some sounds at her and faked a smile as he walked past. On his way to the employee break room he avoided eye contact with the customers, this was a rule of his and he followed it without fail when he was on Allmart premises. It had served him well; in retail, avoidance of the customers was key to maintaining sanity. They had a myriad of inquiries and a needy disposition that could drive even the most calm of us to quickly jump from the nearest rooftop. Quite simply customers meant work and human interaction, neither of which were George’s strong suit.

Swiping his badge through the reader 3 minutes late his supervisor Anna Smith watched him from her seat at the cafeteria style table in the break room.

“Late George…again.” She looked down at a magazine as he shuffled by her. George smiled at her as he walked to his locker, once behind her he flipped her off with both hands and stuck his tongue out at her.

“George I can see you in the reflection.” Looking up he saw himself in the mirror and he locked eyes with Anna’s reflection. He smiled and shrugged, hoping he could charm his way out of trouble.

“Just get your skinny ass to electronics.” She commanded. As he walked away she muttered, “Fucking loser” into her coffee before taking a sip.

“ You’re just…jealous.”

“George, you’re 35, you’re single, you have no prospects for a career, you’re doomed to a lifetime of Allmart employment, and I’m guessing you’ll die alone. I’m not Jealous.” Anna took a sip of coffee in celebration at her proclamation of George’s demise.

George corrected her, “I’m 32.”

Leaving the break room he quietly observed the customers as he walked past them.

Pan Ahead Center: Young couple holding hands and talking. “I’ll never be in love.”

Finally electronics and the shine of dvds and gizmos, George smiled at his coworker Treyvon and walked back to the video game display. He began applying tags to games for the next hour. His thoughts ranged from middle east politics to preferred toilet paper texture.

George limped through his shift; his demons yelling throughout, his stomach rotating with the earth, his life passing him by.

When it was over he drove around town smoking cigarettes, hoping he could tire himself out. Inevitably, he parked in the ALLMART parking lot and stopped. He looked at the barren 2 am landscape and stared without thought. George’s mental landscape as barren as his surroundings, as uninteresting as the structures around him. With complete Clarity he thought to himself, “I am alone. We are all invariably alone.”

He drove back to his apartment and closed the car door as he exited. He walked up the stairs with his head down and the feeling that his soul had left him somewhere at ALLMART. He could sense it browsing through the sock section while he trudged forward alone and vacant, his every nerve aching with every step.

As he got up the stairs to his apartment in front of his door sat a calico cat, a kitten.

“Meow.”

George looked down at the cat at first with disdain and then curiosity. He opened the door to his apartment and the cat bolted inside. George grumbled and watched, seemingly having little choice in the matter.

He walked to the fridge and poured a bowl full of expired milk while the cat danced around his ankles. Setting the bowl down with a groan George watched the cat slurp the milk with a fervor and hunger unknown to him.

George moved into the living room and turned on the television to watch the hockey highlights. The cat followed him an plopped on his lap. Cat and George looked at each other with mutual curiosity, a staring contest of muted empathy that no one was trying to win. Moving his eyes back to the television George bagan to scratch behind the cat’s ears.

“Now I suppose I’ll have to name you.” The cat began to purr.

“I’ll grow attached and then one day when I don’t expect it you’ll run off or I’ll come home and find you dead under the couch.” The calico mewed in delight as George took the scratching to a fevered frequency.

George started flipping through the channels while he scratched, “You can’t sleep in my bed.”